chickens … home … roost

today on both sides of the atlantic we’ve had a couple of positively shining examples of why it’s NOT a good idea to have all this mass immigration** to the west — especially from particularly violent places (see: chechnya, africa) — and doubly especially from particularly violent places where large parts of the population view us as the enemy, an assessment which frankly isn’t entirely wrong.

first, we’ve got a beheading and disemboweling of a soldier in london by a couple of black muslims — at least one of whom has a local london accent, btw:

“Terror at Woolwich barracks: Attacker tried to behead and disembowel British soldier”

“Terrorism returned to the streets of Britain today as a soldier was murdered by two suspected Islamists who attempted to behead and disembowel him as he left his barracks, in the first deadly attack since the 2005 London bombings.

“One of the suspected killers, who addressed an onlooker with a camera, said the pair had carried out the attack ‘because David Cameron, (the) British government sent troops in Arabic country’.

“As pedestrians stood close by the armed men, he went on: ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,’ according to footage obtained by ITV News.

“The soldier was ambushed by the two men as he left the base in Woolwich, south-east London, who attacked him and then dragged his body into the middle of the road to pose for photographs while standing over him waving a machete and a gun, according to witnesses….”

you don’t get much more barbaric than hacking someone to death with a machete. and these guys were armed with handguns, so they specifically CHOSE to kill this unarmed soldier in the way that they did. to make a statement, presumably, but this is also often how they deal with their enemies “back in the old country” (or sweden).

no doubt they viewed a soldier as a legitimate target — a soldier who had actually served in iraq and afghanistan, btw — and it is a slightly less crazy choice than a random civilian — but NOT an unarmed soldier who is just walking down the street. that is just cowardly. and, again, the way they killed him was barbaric — and they had a cleaner option (i.e. they had guns). they preferred barbarism.

in the u.s., the plot thickens (as if it wasn’t already thick enough!) in the boston marathon bombings case:

Friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev shot dead by FBI after ‘pulling a knife as he prepared to sign a confession to 2011 triple homicide’

- Ibragim Todashev, 27, reportedly turned violent during an interview with an FBI agent
- He was being interviewed over his ties to Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev
- Todashev, from Chechnya, was shot dead by the agent just after midnight Wednesday
- He had reportedly confessed to the FBI that he played a role in a brutal triple slaying in the Boston area in 2011
- Todashev had met Tsarnaev while he was living in Boston and last spoke him about a week before the bombing
- He was arrested on May 4 in an unrelated incident after he knocked a man unconscious in a fight over a parking space

involvement in a triple homicide AND you beat a guy senseless in a fight over a parking space?! AND you pull a knife on some fbi agents?? wtf is wrong with you?

i’ll tell you what’s wrong with these people: human biodiversity. they all come from populations which are, on average, more violent than western populations. some of these people probably like the violence — they relish it. note that the elder tsarnaev brother as well as this ibragim todashev were both boxers. these people are quick to anger — and quick to act violently when they are angry.

we know that europeans have, for whatever reasons, become less violent on average since the medieval period. why that is remains open for debate, but it is a fact that cannot be denied. this pacification seems to have happened in other populations as well — japan, china, india. but, comparatively speaking, it has NOT really happened in places like sub-saharan africa, the arab world/middle east/north africa/pakistan/afghanistan, amongst certain tribal peoples of south america, etc.

westerners better wake the f*ck up soon to hbd and that different peoples are different and quit importing people from violent societies, otherwise these events are going to become much more common right here on our doorsteps.

this is not to say that some of these peoples don’t have legitimate grievances with us. sam francis was right about Why They Attack Us many years ago (he was right about a lot of things):

“[T]he blunt truth is that the United States has been at war for years — at least a decade, since we launched a war against Iraq in 1991, even though Iraq had done absolutely nothing to harm the United States or any American. Our bombing attacks on Iraq certainly caused civilian casualties, and if they were not deliberate, nobody beating the war drums at the time felt much regret for them. For ten years, we have maintained economic sanctions on Iraq that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and we have repeatedly bombed it whenever it failed to abide by standards we imposed on it.

“Under Bill Clinton, we again launched bombing raids against civilians — once against so-called ‘terrorist training camps’ supposedly under bin Laden’s control in Afghanistan and at the same time against a purported ‘chemical weapons factory’ in Sudan that almost certainly was no such thing….

“In all the buckets of media gabble about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, not once have I heard any journalist ask any expert the simple question, ‘Why did the terrorists attack us?’

“There is, of course, an implicit answer to the unasked question: It’s because the terrorists are ‘evil’; they ‘hate democracy’; they are ‘fanatics,’ ‘barbarians’ and ‘cowards.’ Those, of course, are answers that can satisfy only children. Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we started.

“Let us hear no more about how the ‘terrorists’ have ‘declared war on America….’

“The blunt and quite ugly truth is that the United States has been at war for years — that it started the war in the name of ‘spreading democracy,’ ‘building nations,’ ‘waging peace,’ ‘stopping aggression,’ ‘enforcing human rights,’ and all the other pious lies that warmongers always invoke to mask the truth, and that it continued the war simply to save a crook from political ruin. What is new is merely that this week, for the first time, the war we started came home — and all of a sudden, Americans don’t seem to care for it so much.”
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**although as steve sailer keeps pointing out, there are only one or two hundred chechens totally in the u.s., so apparently ANY amount of immigration from chechnya is a bad idea.

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linkfest – 04/15/13

Born to run: genetic test can reveal those best able to run marathons – “[T]o run a marathon in a good time requires the right combination of genes and that nearly a fifth of the population lack this special mix. For runners with the right genes, it means their bodies can quickly adapt to carry large amounts of oxygen to their muscles, allowing them to run faster and for longer. Those who lack these genes, however, will never improve, no matter how much they train, and their performance may even get worse the harder they push themselves.”

Scientists Breed Exercise-Crazy Rats – “While a wide biological gap exists between humans and rats, the researchers do propose that some people could be genetically predisposed against exercising.”

Genetic discovery found to influence obesity in people of African ancestry

New Studies Shake Up Human Family Tree – “[I]n a spate of new studies, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, and a team of collaborators have put forward a controversial claim that another hominin — *Australopithecus sediba* — might be even closer to the origin of our lineage [than *australopithecus afarensis,* the most famous example being "lucy"]….” — see also: Special Collection – Australopithecus sediba @science.

Fish Fossil Shows Why Humans Have Two Arms, Legs

Castaways – “We may have yet another story of long-distance prehistoric contact. A new paper in PLOS genetics suggests that people from the Jomon culture in Japan may have reached northwestern South America.” – from greg cochran. also from south america: Southern Native American Y-DNA: no correlation with language – @for what they were…we are.

Fluctuation of Fertility with Number in a Real Insect Population and a Virtual Population – “Real fruit fly fertility increases with average consanguinity thus decreasing with population size in a pattern that is modelled successfully with a virtual population. This invites the deliberate manipulation of wild insect populations for the control of vectors of human disease.” – from our very own linton herbert! yay! (^_^)

Do drugs for bipolar disorder ‘normalize’ brain gene function? U-M study suggests so – “Brain tissue study shows gene expression in patients treated with antipsychotics is similar to expression in non-bipolar brains.”

Serenity – “If the realities of human nature render your hope on how to make a better world impossible, merely wishing it were not so is not going to help your cause. But instead, better results can be attained to by working *with* what we learn about human nature.” – from jayman. hear, hear!

HVGIQ: Dominican Republic – from jason malloy.

Napoleon Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” – The Life of an Anthropological Heretic – “Napoleon Chagnon’s ‘Noble Savages’ is a must read.” – from helian unbound.

Frequent texters more shallow, racist, study finds – w.e.i.r.d. students. (psychology students, no less! (~_^) ) also: Texting, social networking and other media use linked to poor academic performance.

Study: we assume people stare at us – “People often think that other people are staring at them even when they aren’t, vision scientists have found. In a new article in Current Biology, researchers at The Vision Centre reveal that, when in doubt, the human brain is more likely to tell its owner that they’re under the gaze of another person.”

Political organization in a hunter-gatherer tribe – @mangan’s.

First Encounters of the Close Kind: John Derbyshire’s Address To The 2013 American Renaissance Conference – from john derbyshire.

Jared Taylor Remembers Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen

Our Inconsistent Ethical Instincts – read also: The Pro-Death Movement from jim goad – “[T]here’s an almost universal human definition of good and evil: If it enhances my survival, it’s good. If it harms it, it’s evil.” – yup.

Individual Donation Amounts Drop When Givers Are in Groups, Says MU Researcher – “Numerous studies have provided evidence that people are less likely to help when in groups, a phenomenon known as the ‘bystander effect.’” – see also this old post from steve sailer: Chinese kindness.

The Fraud Of America’s “Rape Culture” – from anatoly. see also his earlier post Much Ado About Rape: Quantifying A Big Taboo – “[I]t is ironic that the public panic over rape and sexual assault has risen to fever pitch at precisely the moment in history when the real lifetime risk of becoming a victim of rape has never been lower.”

Monkey chatter smacks of human speech, researcher says

How Parents Around the World Describe Their Children, in Charts – “A fascinating new study reveals that Americans are more likely to call their children ‘intelligent,’ while European parents focus on happiness and balance.”

DNA Shows It: Birds Are Promiscuous – “Here’s the warm and fuzzy part of this column: most birds really do mate for life. But here’s the cold side: They mess around. And here’s the switch: Blame the ladies.”

How to blackmail your parents for food – “Fledglings extort food by putting themselves in danger.”

When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human – cr*p. i hate sad animal stories. *sniff*

Hawking: Humans Will Not Survive Another 1,000 Years ‘Without Escaping’ Earth – manifest destiny!

In Defence of Pseudonyms in Science: Defending the Right to Write

bonus: read this!>> Sam Parnia – the man who could bring you back from the dead – “This British doctor specialises in resurrection and insists outdated resuscitation techniques are squandering lives that could be saved.”

bonus bonus: James Lovelock: A man for all seasons – lovelock thinks there are too many people on the planet.

bonus bonus bonus: and this week’s “bras in the news” stories >> Bras Make Breasts “Saggier”, 15-year French [of course! - h.chick] Study Reveals and How your under-wired bra could kill you… if you’re a keen walker – “Metal in under-wired bras can cause compasses to be reversed because of the magnetic effect”. (sorry, no naked boobies at either of those pages.)

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no joke

it’s the pokomo people (agriculturalists) vs. the orma people (pastoralists) this time. in kenya. they’ve fought before, so this is nothing new. but these people really do mean business:

nobody accidentally leaves a machete scar like that on a nine-month-old kid (orma kid, btw). i bet the person who did that meant to behead that child, they just missed.

this photo reminded me of a quote about the yanomamo that steven pinker had in Better Angels:

“Helena Valero, a woman who had been abducted by the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan rain forest in the 1930s, recounted one of their raids:

“‘Meanwhile from all sides the women continued to arrive with their children, whom the other Karawetari had captured…. Then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows, which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks…. All the women wept.’”

i can’t help but think that such peoples are gratified — on average — by committing such violent acts in a way (or ways) that other peoples simply are not. pinker talked at some length in Better Angels about how western soldiers have difficulties firing their weapons directly at enemy combatants [edit: or civilians - see comment below]. they’re repulsed by it. some peoples — like the pokomo and the yanomamo — don’t seem to be. at least not so much.

different evolutionary histories would be my guess (obviously!).

what is a joke is the way these things are written up in the msm:

Neighbors Kill Neighbors as Kenyan Vote Stirs Old Feuds

neighbors kill neighbors? gimme a break! this guy makes it sound like mr. jones went a little nuts one day and strangled mr. smith while they were chatting over the picket fence separating their front yards. westerners really need to start getting a grip on reality — and stop imagining that other people are just like us — if we’re ever going to understand what’s going on in the world at all!

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random notes: 08/29/12

just some random notes that i want to keep track of — and that i thought might interest some of you guys out there — but that i haven’t, or am not planning to, work into a full post — not just now anyhoo. enjoy!
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the law of wihtred from the 690s:

“The Law of Wihtred is an early English legal text attributed to the Kentish king Wihtred (died 725). It is believed to date to the final decade of the 7th century and is the last of three Kentish legal texts…. It is devoted primarily to offences within and against the church, as well as church rights and theft.”

from The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective [pg. 216]:

“Marriage was redefined, as a consequence of the influence of the Church, in the laws of Wihtred; four chapters (Wi. 3-6) condemn illicit unions — namely unconsecrated unions, bigamous unions or unions within the forbidden degrees.”

so here we have a secular, anglo-saxon (jutish!) law from the late 600s banning cousin marriage (should be out to second cousins according to canon law at this point in time). this was in kent. this was also just at the beginning of the era when mating practices were loosened in england — right after the anglo-saxon-jutes converted to christianity. who knows how well … or for how long … the law of wihtred was enforced.
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from The development of the family and marriage in Europe [pg. 144]:

“Much later this [the church's cousin marriage ban] was reduced to the second degree [i.e. first cousins] for Indians of South American origin in 1537, for Blacks in 1897, and then for the world at large in 1917.”

the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church (gotta love the full title!) regularly offered concessions on the whole cousin marriage thing for new converts: they did so for the anglo-saxons/other germanic tribes, and again for the baltic populations. not surprising that they should also do so for native americans and africans.

i don’t know if the 1537 exemption applied to mexican/central american populations as well or just to south american indians. that’s something i need to find out.
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previously: east anglia, kent and manorialism

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and now for something completely different…

somali bantus.

i started thinking about them the other day (week) when jayman mentioned all of the somali “refugees” in lewiston, maine. (whyyy?) i know that a lot(?)/most(?) of the somali refugees here in the u.s. are somali bantus — and i remembered reading somewhere that they are the descendants of bantu slaves brought to somalia at some time or another (turns out that was the nineteenth century). but i started wondering about their family/kinship/marriage structures and all that, so i looked ‘em up.

the somali somalis refer to the bantu somalis as jareer or “hard hair.” they’re also known as the gosha, which relates to the areas in somalia where they live. it’s estimated that ca. 50,000 bantu slaves were brought to somalia between 1800-1890 [pg. 45], and they hailed from a handful of different ethnic groups from tanzania, mozambique and malawi — so right there, the somali bantu are like african-americans in that they are not all from one ethnic group (i.e. they’re unrelated to some degree).

almost as soon as they arrived in somalia, some of the bantu slaves escaped and sought out a living in the bush — the bush in somalia being two river valleys — the shebelle and jubba river valleys. the earliest escapees formed villages based on ethnicity, i.e. whether they were yao or zingua or whatever. later escapees and, even later, freed slaves (slavery was legally abolished by the italians around 1900) formed villages based on the somali clans to which they had been in servitude. so the later villages were a mix of bantu peoples (yao or zingua or whatever). [pgs. 45-46]

so, did the somali bantu “mix it up” once they lived in multi-ethnic villages? of course not! [pgs. 53-54]:

“How the Gosha see themselves is quite different from this external perception of the Gosha as somehow a clan of their own. They see themselves as a group of people of very different origins living and working together in one geographical area….

“While most people of the Gosha are products of subjugated ancestors (and some of the oldest Gosha were themselves slaves), these ancestors came from different regional areas…. [S]lave children and free descendents of slaves retained a knowledge of the distinction between being of East African (Yao, Nyasa, etc.) and being of Oromo heritage [another non-somali ethnic group in somalia]. Somali clans could have slaves of both Oromo heritage and East African heritage, used for different purposes. Once these slaves attained their freedom, they and their children could then be affiliated to the same Somali clan, despite their separate areas of origin. In this way, villages formed along Somali clan lines in the Jubba Valley could contain people of both Oromo and East African heritage, who claimed affiliation to the same Somali clan. Within a village, while working together and cooperating on village matters, people of different ancestries tend to live separately, and marry endogamously, although this is changing….

“For Gosha individuals, their sense of who they are is quite complex, with many social and cultural components. At base is their knowledge of their ancestry — Oromo, reer Shabelle [yet another group], or other East African groups….”

and, more specifically about the somali bantus’ marriage practices (they have a preference for cousin marriage) [pgs. 84, 105 & 148]:

“Within a village, while working together and cooperating on village matters, people of different ancestries often lived separately and married endogamously (due to a preference for parallel or cross-cousin marriage) in the late 1980s….

“As noted above, marriages were often (but certainly not always) arranged between members of the same clan and same ancestry due to the preference for cousin marriage. Thus we see an ongoing recognition — however muted in daily praxis and sentiment — of ancestral identities by Loc villagers….

“Following the preference for cousin marriage, Xalima arranged for her youngest daughter to marry the son of her Laysan brother, which in this case produced another generation of cross-clan marriage….”

oh, i almost forgot — their fundamental extended-family groups are matrilineal, so in that way, the somali bantus are not like somali somalis (or other muslim groups like arabs or afghanis). the matrilineal system is a much more traditional, african system.

so the bantu somalis are not one group of people AND they’ve been maintaining their genetic differences for many generations now — right up until at least the 1980s. we’re not importing one group of somali “refugees” — we’re importing a whole slew of groups who, being inbred, probably don’t get along all that well with each other. this really is a recipe for disaster. *facepalm*

btw – after fleeing somalia, a lot of the somali bantus wanted to return “home” to tanzania — and a lot apparently did. and are still doing so. that sounds like a great idea to me! i’m sure they would be much happier there and would fit in better than they seem to be doing in america (and elsewhere in the west).

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a non-result result?

greying wanderer noted how botswana did well — very well — on the corruption perceptions index. the country scored like a middle-range western european country.

so, i looked up botswana on good ol’ wikipedia and the only thing potentially interesting (to me) that i could see is that, although there are several ethnic groups in the country, there is one that has a strong majority — the tswana.

hmmmm, i thought. maybe there’s a correlation between having a strong majority in a country and degree of (perceived) corruption in a country.

so, i looked up all the sub-saharan african countries included in transparency international’s 2011 survey to find out their demographics. except for zambia, all of the demographic data i used i got from wikipedia so … you know … the data are from wikipedia!

i found ethnic group size data for the following countries — the percentage represents the size of the largest ethnic group in the country:

Angola – 37.0%
Benin – 19.0%
Botswana – 79.0%
Burkina Faso – 40.0%
Cameroon – 19.0%
Cape Verde – 100.0%
Central African Republic – 33.0%
Congo Republic – 48.0%
Cote d’Ivoire – 42.1%
Djibouti – 60.0%
Eritrea – 55.0%
Ethiopia – 34.5%
Gabon – 33.0%
Gambia – 42.0%
Ghana – 49.3%
Guinea – 34.2%
Guinea-Bissau – 30.0%
Kenya – 22.0%
Lesotho – 99.7%
Liberia – 20.0%
Madagascar – 20.0%
Malawi – 25.0%
Mali – 36.5%
Mauritania – 40.0%
Mauritius – 68.0%
Mozambique – 18.0%
Namibia – 49.8%
Niger – 56.0%
Nigeria – 29.0%
Rwanda – 84.0%
Senegal – 43.0%
Seychelles – 70.0%
Sierra Leone – 35.0%
South Africa – 22.0%
Swaziland – 100.0%
Tanzania – 16.0%
Togo – 32.0%
Uganda – 16.9%
Zambia – 10.0%

edit – forgot these four:

Burundi - 85.0%
Equatorial Guinea – 80.0%
Somalia – 85.0%
Sudan – 73.0%

i couldn’t find any good numbers for the following countries, so they are not included:

Chad
Comoros
Dem Rep of the Congo
Sao Tome & Principe
Zimbabwe

and was there any correlation between the size of the biggest ethnic group in a country and corruption?

nope. i got a correlation of 0.29. no correlation. nada. zip. zilch.

unleeeesssss…

unless i take out the lowest scorers — the countries who got a 1 or 1.something on the corruption index. there were four of those: Burundi (1.9), Equatorial Guinea (1.9), Somalia (1.0) and Sudan (1.6).

then i get a correlation of 0.59, which is not all that weak for social data. it looks like this:

why are burundi, equatorial guinea, somalia and sudan so weird? — if they are weird.

well, the majority groups of equatorial guinea, somalia and sudan — the fang, ethnic somalis and the sudanese arabs respectively — are all groups based around patrlineal kinship groups — clans and tribes. and we know how divisive THOSE are. maybe it doesn’t matter that these countries have strong majority ethnic groups if those groups are divided into hostile clans and tribes. same difference, really — if you see what i mean. don’t know about the social structures of the hutu (the majority ethnic group) in burundi.

so, i either came up with a non-result, which is always interesting! or there is something in the ethnic/clan structure of these populations that possibly relates to corruption levels. unless i’m massaging the data. heh.

anyway. that’s how i spent my afternoon. (^_^)

previously: same old, same old

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civic societies ii

first of all, i’ve updated the original civic societies post — all the way from yesterday! — to include africa, latin america, and india, so you might want to check that out.

and now … drum roll, please! … the totals for all the countries in the survey (that’s the world values survey, 2005-08 wave) — including a GLOBAL TOTAL. (see the previous post for why anybody should care.) again, answering the question(s):

“Now I am going to read out a list of voluntary organizations; for each one, could you tell me whether you are a member, an active member, an inactive member or not a member of that type of organization?

- Church or religious organization
– Sport or recreation organization
– Art, music or educational organization
– Labour union
– Political party
– Environmental organization
– Professional association
– Charitable organization
– Any other voluntary organization”

and, again, these numbers represent people who responded ACTIVE MEMBER:

below are a whole bunch of charts illustrating these numbers. some interesting points:

- the middle east/maghreb and eastern europe are consistently at the bottom, swapping last place here and there — mostly the middle east/maghreb occupies the total losers position in the civic society rankings. arabs and eastern europeans seemingly just don’t give a f*ck.

- to my pleasant surprise, african nations always scored above the global total and very often near the top. whatever you wanna say about africans, they are civically engaged. good for them!

- western europeans (either anglos or french/germanics) occupy the top spot almost half the time (4 out of 9); indians three times; africans twice.

- except for church/religious organization and charity/humanitarian organziation (two pretty good categories) latin americans always score below the global total.

- east and southeast asians only scored above the global total on three questions: political party, environmental organization and professional organization.

- anglos are waaay ahead of all the other groups in being active members of a charity/humanitarian organization.

- africans are waaay ahead of everybody in being active members of a church or religious organization.

- western europeans (including americans, canadians, australians, kiwis) luuuuuuuv sports.

ok. hold on. here are all the charts. click on any of them for a LARGER version (should open in a new browser tab/window):

i think there’s some funny numbers in this “other” category (see previous post, esp. the africa numbers), so take this chart with a grain of salt:

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monogamy, serial monogamy, and polygamy

laura betzig makes a convincing argument that, especially for the elites — both secular and clerical (think popes and bishops) — marriage in medieval europe might have been monogamous, but mating wasn’t. not only were the elites not all that monogamous in their mating practices, many of them were also incestuous [pgs. 185-86]:

“In the same vein — and maybe richest of all accounts — is Lambert of Ardres’ ‘Historia comitum Ghisnensium,’ the early thirteenth-century pean to his benefactor, Count Baudouin. Marc Bloch calls Baudouin ‘hunter, toper, and great wencher’ (1961, p. 104), and Georges Duby has made a lot of the last. As he puts it: ‘Life in a noble household was a hotbed of sex’ (1983, p. 70). Or, as Lambert says: ‘”From the beginning of adolescence until his old age, his loins were stirred by the intemperance of an impatient libido…; very young girls, and especially virgins, aroused his desire”‘ (Duby 1978, p. 93). Roissy Baudouin and his kinsmen are said to have preferred pretty women; no matter how casually sexually encountered they are all described as ‘beautiful.’ And, evidently, fruitful: This count was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance, besides ten living legitimate daughters and sons (p. 94).

“Even these might have been just the fruits of the family tree’s primary limbs. As Lambert notes, Baudouin by no means kept account of all his bastards. These were usually scattered far and wide. And, as Duby notes, noble men would just as soon have the ignoble women — the servants, slaves, and whores — who begot so many of them. The lovers noble men did remember may have included their vassals’ daughters, ‘but there is more evidence that they were the family’s bastard daughters, who formed a kind of pleasure reserve within the house itself’ (Duby 1978, p. 94). This kind of sex was, then, endogamous. Noble or half-noble women begat noble or half-nobel children, ad infinitum. ‘Illegitimacy was a normal part of the structure of ordinary society — so normal that illegitimate children, especially males, were neither concealed nor rejected’ (Duby 1983, p. 262). They always had the right, at least, to bed and board in their father’s house. ‘That house was always open to them’ (p. 263.) Bastards like these, the cream of the illegitimate crop, are most likely to have made up the twenty-three who watched when Baudouin was interred.”

so, not a big surprise, powerful men in the middle ages tried to maximize the number of offspring they had. and they even mated somewhat incestuously sometimes.

this made me wonder how different marriage or mating patterns affect relatedness within a society — apart from mating with relatives or not, that is. i mean: how does monogamy or polygamy affect the relatedness between the members of a society?

so, forget about cousin marriage and all that jazz for a second. here’s what strict monogamy looks like (think christian europe). (yes, i know there’s always a little hanky-panky — the milkman and mrs. jones, for instance — this is just schematic.):

first of all, triangles are men and circles are women. i colorized only the men ’cause it just got too confusing to colorize everybody. the women have been numbered instead. the point is that, here in strict monogamy land, there are six men and six women, none of whom are related, who marry/mate, and each pair has two kids. each pair of kids, then, (barring any hanky-panky) is related to their parents and each other, but not to anybody else in their society. each little nuclear-family is a discrete, “atomized” group. (this isn’t completely the case in a real population, of course. in every natural society, the members are related somehow, even if it’s distantly.)

in contrast, polygamy narrows the gene pool since one man can have several wives. thus there are several sets of half-brothers and half-sisters within polygamy land who are (obviously) all related to one another (think arab and many african countries). and some men fall out of the gene pool altogether. here mr. green marries contestants women numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6, while messrs. red, orange and yellow are out of luck:

so, with polygamy, the gene pool within a society narrows. in reality, what typically happens, at least in arab/muslim societies, is that the polygamy occurs frequently within the extended family, so that the gene pool narrows even more within the extended family. the other thing that often happens — particularly in arab countries — is that there is a lot of divorce, so in reality you have something like a serial monogamy, only it’s a serially polygamous society.

(whew! this is gettin’ complicated. *hbd chick wipes brow*)

finally, serial monogamy (think the amhara of ethiopia — or modern western society):

here in my schematic serial monogamy land, each of the men has married twice to two different women and has had one kid with each of them. so, each kid has one half-sibling via his father AND one half-sibling via his mother. so, the relatedness is not quite as narrow as in a polygamous society (every man does get to produce offspring) — but at the same time, there are more genetic connections between the members of the society than in a strict monogamy. (in reality, serial monogamy is often more like polygamy since many women vie for the chance to mate with the best men, while the whiskeys of the world are left out in the cold.)

in strict monogamy, in the second generation, each child shares (probably) 50% of their genes with their one and only sibling. in serial monogamy, each child shares (probably) 25% of their genes with two siblings. the connections look like this (plus the kids of mr. blue and mr. yellow at the ends are also related):

complicated, huh?

(btw — in polygamy, each child shares (probably) 50% of their genes with the sibling with whom they share a mother, and (probably) 25% of their genes with their half-siblings via their father.)

so, if we recall again that in a natural population the members of a society do, of course, share a lot of genes in common, then we can see that a strict monogamy would keep the genetic ties between non-family members “broad but shallow”; a population practising serial monogamy has somewhat narrower and deeper genetic ties between non-immediate family members, i.e. extended familiy ties within the society are stronger; and polygamy leads to narrow and deep genetic ties within the extended family, which becomes somewhat cut-off from the larger society. (this is even more so the case when you recall that cousin-marriage is common in polygamous societies.)

i think that the coporate and individualistic nature of western europeans (especially the english!) is connected to the (somewhat) strictly monogamous, non-cousin marriage mating patterns which have been around since the early medieval period in much of europe. these mating patterns set the stage for the selection of certain personality traits — individualism + clark’s traits — since western european families were mostly discrete and independent units making their own way in the world. these traits made western european man what he is today was yesterday.

the fact that europeans (including those of us in the u.s., australia, etc.) are now adopting serial monogamy must mean big changes are in store.

edit: boilerplate and boilerplate 2.0

_{(note: comments do not require an email. strictly monogamous.)}